On Tuesday morning, Felini will be among hundreds of city employees recognized by City Manager Mary Suhm with a place on the City Hall Wall of Honor.

But Felini no longer oversees the southern Dallas-based Prostitution Diversion Initiative (PDI) he launched in 2007 and for which Suhm will honor him. That’s because Dallas Police Chief David Brown’s administration transferred Felini over the summer from South Central Patrol, where he also supervised a specialized plain-clothes unit, to Northwest Patrol. He now works an overnight shift as a uniformed patrol supervisor.

Transfers to less-desirable overnight shifts are often viewed as punitive. So in Felini’s case many officers privately expressed surprise at the abrupt change.

Brown’s boss said her understanding was that a key reason for the change was that the PDI belonged under the purview of the Dallas Police Vice Unit, which typically handles prostitution cases.

“It really wasn’t so much taking him off that program that it was putting that program in the part of the organization that normally does that sort of work,” Suhm said.

Suhm said she was not concerned about the move.

“The chiefs that run the department do it for the good of the department and I trust their judgment in doing that,” Suhm said. “This situation is a program that sprouted outside of the structure, the normal structure, and I think it’s an acknowledgment of his work and the value of it that it becomes a permanent part of the organization.”

She added: “It’s important in this kind of organization that it really is about the organization and serving the citizens and not about the individual. Again, it’s a huge, huge compliment to his work that it becomes a part of the normal structure of the organization.”